Beyond the portal: modernizing the dealer experience on an ERP-integrated composable core

Creating customer-facing ERPs

The pressure isn't only coming from buyers. Manufacturers are sitting on decades of ERP investment — systems that are essential to running the business but were built for internal employees. But bolting a customer-facing portal onto an ERP doesn't solve the problem. It creates a new one: an interface that can answer a question, but isn’t capable of driving a decision.

The main challenge this industry is facing lies in the gap between what dealers expect and what most portals can deliver. Brian Browning, VP of Enterprise Solutions at APPLY, understands this modernization challenge better than most, with years of experience guiding some of the most ambitious brands in the world to overcome it, and succeed.

The middleware solution

Q: What is an ERP and why does it need to be modernized in the first place?

The ERP is the system of truth — inventory, pricing, tax calculation, order management. Everything you need to run the business lives there. But it's not designed to be modern or customer-facing. It doesn't persuade, it doesn’t personalize. It can’t anticipate what a dealer needs next

So when organizations try to build a portal directly on top of an ERP, they end up with an interface that can answer a question but can't drive an experience. The core challenge is how you marry those two realities: you need the system of record to complete the transaction, and you need a composable front-end to actually engage the dealer. 

That's where the middleware layer becomes critical — it handles the difference between constantly querying the ERP and still delivering dynamic and relevant answers. 

Q: And real-time integration — is that what most organizations should be aiming for?

Not necessarily. If I have 1000 units in stock, I don't need to check the ERP every time to see that I now have 950. What matters is when stock gets genuinely low — that's when accuracy is critical. 

For everything else, batch processing through a middleware layer is a more sensible architecture. You're talking to the middleware, and it's updating hourly or overnight in the background. The goal is near-real-time where it matters, not constant integration that creates performance issues and serves no real business purpose.

This is where most implementations go awry. Customer-facing portals are integrated without catering to the needs and complexities of an ERP, forcing the system to perform beyond its limits and leaving businesses to face breakdowns that can cause heavy delays.

APPLY has navigated this challenge before. When Coca-Cola Embonor needed to modernize its B2B ordering experience without replacing its legacy back-end, APPLY built a composable front-end and integrated a middleware layer to bridge the gap — generating a 40% increase in revenue and a 75% increase in B2B profit.

But the harder question — the one where most modernization projects actually stall — is what happens inside the organization when the technology is already in place.

Leaving the inertia of comfort behind

Q: Where do these projects typically go wrong?

The technology is actually the easier part. There are multiple ways to connect an ERP to a digital experience platform — that's a solvable problem. What's harder is the human side: the inertia, the muscle memory, the "we've always done it this way" that lives inside every business process. Real change management goes well beyond training. It means communication plans, governance models, and persona-specific transition paths. 

We are now working with a multi-billion dollar manufacturer of doors and windows. When replacing their ordering process with a new configuration engine, we had to map the transition for every stakeholder — the technical developers, the salespeople, the customers. Each group needed its own plan. 

We also need our ‘internal change champions’, people who are the face of the initiative and can make others excited about what's coming. Town halls, executive communications, governance councils. These are the things that move the needle, and they're just as important as the technology.

Q: What can be gained by integrating a dealer portal, and where do sales teams come in?

The portal should be handling nuisance work — order status checks, accessory compatibility questions, filter replacements, price confirmations. These are necessary tasks, but they're a bad use of expensive sales time. No enterprise sales professional wants to spend their day tracking down an order status at 2am when a distributor asks.

What they want is to be focused on new accounts, growing existing ones, and closing the big deal. What the portal does is take the low-value volume off the sales team's load — and actually free them to do the work they're built for.

When looking towards the future, enterprises need to understand that beyond the technological implementations, and choosing the right architecture for their business, change management is one of the variables most within their control. 

This requires its own roadmap, a true understanding of the internal workings of the business, and how they wish to move forward.

The modernization imperative

The dealer experience gap has a retention problem — and it will only deepen as digital-native buyers take over purchasing decisions. The manufacturers who close it now won't just be catching up. They'll be building the foundation for what comes next.

And what comes next is closer than most think. Agentic procurement is already close enough to plan for, and when it arrives, it will move fast. The good news? Organizations on composable, ERP-integrated infrastructure will be ready to go, instead of starting from scratch.

If you know your ERP needs an upgrade, but don’t know where to begin, click here to get in touch with one of our experts. 

Co-written by Francisca García Charad